Friday, June 01, 2018

MT has come up with an interesting observation, which Eli has dubbed Tobis' Rule

If a large data set speaks
convincingly against you find a smaller and noisier one that you can
huffily cite.

There are any number of wonderful examples of Tobis' Rule. All the bunnies have observed that the mean global sea level rise since 1880 has accelerated in the last twenty years. The record is built on tide gauges and in recent decades on satellite observations. Tamino has been all over this one time and again

So Eli asks, what is the smaller and noisier one that our friends at denial central point to? Hold the Bunny's beer:

Who amongst us Eli asks has not observed that the global temperature anomaly is rising

Well there are a lot of Okies out there

This being the Stanley Cup final weeks, the classic hockey stick based on a large number of proxys

Of course, there are a lot more where that came from

and if you get a cast of a thousand or so paleoclimate people out pops Pages 2K but what does Eli see without end on blogs, twitter and so forth, why a sketch from HH Lamb that appeared in the first IPCC report based on the Central England Temperature series

A bunny could make a hobby out of tracing down all the "enhanced" variations of this sketch which had it's origin in the 1960s, but that, of course is another story

Humble readers, in Eli's humble opinion Tobis' Rule ranks right up there with the Gish Gallop. Make it so. Make it so

34 comments:

You should use data all the way to 2018. I think I've noticed a slight deceleration in sea level rise over the last two years, lately I can move my beach towel about 2 cm further away from the sea wall when I lay on the sand, and I attribute this to a 1,2 mm sea level drop. But I can't find a reliable up to date sea level graph. For some reason those aren't updated.

Come on, you guys cut off the data all the time and now you blame me for using a personal anecdote to soften your embarrassment? Neither side has any credibility by now. You are like Fox News and CNN, they are so bad I don't even set my watch by them anymore. Maybe I'll start my own real facts network and have a daily review of the climate on YouTube, including shots of that Hawaian volcano oozing and burning the scenery into Mordor (which isn't relevant but should bring more viewers)

This post is about arguing with the denierati about facts. We have been doing that for two fracking decades. Time to stop; redirect our efforts toward more deserving topics re solutions.

Here are a couple:

1) Should our RE future be publicly-owned and as cheap as possible or should we just let the profiteers take over?

2) Is a carbon tax the worst popular idea of our lifetime or just the second worst? Seriously, we need a *real* in-depth conversation on what the term means, whether it could possibly work at all, how it should be measured for success if we do use it, and whether it is the best way to move forward in the timeframe open to us.

Gingerbaker thinks that it's time to move on. But, as long as the $denialist continue to produce massive volumes of disinformation which aim to knock the supports out from under the scientific facts, attempts to move on to solutions are likely to be hopeless. Witness Fred Singer's latest on sea-level or the recent piece by Steven F. Hayward, both in the WSJ:

So, the 20-year long campaign of arguing with morons and liars about facts has not only been a losing proposition, but is doomed to failure because they gotz the money not us. Therefore, we should continue arguing with morons and liars about facts?

Because, you say, "attempts to move on to solutions are likely to be hopeless". I disagree. Even Republicans support renewable energy when they can make a buck from it. Even Republicans resent paying through the nose for something.

Well, perhaps the way forward is to propose a plan for RE that will put money into all of our pockets instead of into the coffers of Exxon Mobil. That means RE at the lowest possible cost.

Right now, in the U.S., we spend about $1.5 trillion per year on fossil fuels, about $3500.00 for every single person. A big brand spanking new 100% RE system should cost between 6 - 15 trillion dollars. Longevity of RE systems is at least 30 years, likely 2 or 3 times that. That is a very persuasive argument, don't you think?

Gingerbaker, I became involved with renewable energy systems back in '73, installing what I believe to have been the first "modern" wind energy system in California. I've been following things with great interest since. I live in a super insulated solar heated house I built myself, which provides a good fraction of my heating during the winter, but I still rely on propane for much of my heating needs.

I think it's wonderful that PV is said to be competitive with fossil fuels, though the cost numbers aren't as clear as some would like to think. Depending on the particular installation, PV capacity may be less expensive than coal, but there's the big problem of meeting demand during night time as well as periods of clouds, which produce no output. Wind generators have grown to very large sizes since I installed that little 2kw system, though there are still the usual problems with demand matching. Adding storage helps, but there's the occasional period with not enough supply to meet demand.

With grid connected systems, as the fraction of renewables increases, the intermittency problem becomes even more severe, IMHO. It seems to me that ultimately, there would need to be a complete secondary backup available to meet the entire demand, even with interchange between different regions. Renewables are more likely to suffer damage during extreme weather events, as we saw in Puerto Rica after hurricane Maria. I saw photos and videos of large areas of smashed PV panels and wind turbines splintered after the winds subsided. The electric grid in Puerto Rica is still being repaired, as I understand it. Storm damage such as that over the US East Coast region in winter would be a deadly catastrophe.

I would like to be optimistic, but age and experience tells me it ain't over yet. And FYI, I'm not pro nuke...

DB, So, the nuke industrial/political gang has solved the waste problem after 40 years of effort? And, those 2 next generation plants are on the grid pumping out gigawatts of too-cheap-to-meter electric power? Of course, the Japanese must have stopped the flood of radioactive water in their cleanup of Fukushima, their "ice wall" doing it's job before their storage capacity limit is breached. Sorry, I hadn't heard the good news...

Weapons grade plutonium only exists in weapons or in the single repository in other than highly diluted form. The once through nuclear pins from a light water reactor are a mixture of isotopes of various actinides and some actual waste products. These are quite safe to ship in dry casks. The Navy routinely sends theirs to the Idaho National Laboratory reservation outside of Idaho Falls.

The result will be a mixture of isotopes, almost all of plutonium. It won't explode, irrespective of geometry and even with the very best of George Kistakowski's pyrotechnics.

John von Neumann went to New York to obtain enough computer power to ascertain that only single isotope plutonium would do. Even so, the device required testing in the New Mexico desert, unlike the uranium bomb which was never tested, just used.

In summary, once through nuclear pins from light water reactors can only supply bomb components at a cost greatly in excess of simply centrifuging natural uranium. That is what India and Pakistan do and maybe what other countries were trying to do. It doesn't have anything to do with nuclear power plants.

Well, to run a fast neutron reactor one has to have a supply of plutonium to start with. Turns out that once through nuclear pins from light water reactors provide a starting point.

But all fast neutron reactors, whether run as breeders or consumers of plutonium, produce a mixture of isotopes of various actinides and some actual waste products. The mixture of isotopes of plutonium, even if chemical separated from all the other stuff, is not explodable.

DB, I read "Plentiful Energy" a while back. Sounds great, one must wonder why the plan was canned by the Clinton administration. Maybe it's the same problem as the MOX facility at Savannah River, which DOE Secretary just tried to cancel - POLITICS...

More likely because a) isotope separation became a spin off private company and b) a ton of weapons grade uranium was decommisioned, and diluted and sold to the US by the Russians. a and b killed the AVLIS laser isotope separation project too. Eli has some mirrors from it if you want a souvenier.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.